Chapter 1103: The Plane
June 1997
The Barn bail meant a restricted jet, so the Gulfstream sat at Midway with a tarp over the nose and two mechanics billing by the week.
The order ran four lines and only the last one had teeth: no aircraft owned or controlled by the defendant, out of state by carrier or by charter, and the charter filed with the clerk the day before it flew.
So they put him on somebody else's airplane. A converted Lear out of Teterboro with a bed bolted in where the seats had been, an oxygen bottle strapped upright in the galley, two agency nurses, and room in the back for exactly one more person.
Sloane took it before anybody else could. "I've been sitting in hotel lobbies for five months," she told Linda. "I'm getting on that plane if I have to sit on the oxygen bottle." Mariah had her own plane, and Rhaegar, and a schedule that had been torn up twice in four days. Yeremov was going back to Los Angeles to have his nervous breakdown there.
Linda was on the commercial flight with Dr. Chen and eleven boxes of paper. She'd paid the excess baggage in cash, because two of the corporate cards had been frozen in March and nobody knew by whom.
Old Mike had wanted the seat. Alex told him no. "Five months I sat with him, two hospitals, and he gives the seat to her," the old man grumbled to nobody, and went forward and folded himself into the jump seat behind the pilots.
He sat with his hat on his knees and his good ear to the cockpit door. The first officer tried to be friendly. "You want a headset, sir? It's a long seven hundred miles with nothing to listen to."
Mike didn't turn his head. "I've got one good ear, son, and I'm keeping it for the boy."
"Suit yourself. It's Mike, right?"
Mike's head came round. "What!"
"Nothing, nothing," the first officer said, and didn't say another word until Cleveland.
Twenty minutes in, Alex opened his eyes. "Shut the curtain."
Sloane had her shoes off, her heels up on the edge of the bed frame and a legal pad on her knee. She got up, pulled the curtain across to the galley and sat back down. "You know the nurses are eight feet away, right?"
"They'll live. Come here, I don't want to shout." She leaned in until her hair was touching the pillow, and he turned his head toward her. "About January. The shooting wasn't random."
"You think I sat in that hotel five months thinking it was random? I never thought it was, APLUS."
"Tommy Mottola set it up. The shooting, the whole thing."
"Mottola." Sloane went white, then red. Stringer had pushed Mottola out of Columbia last fall, and by January he'd been managing Michael Jackson. The papers had still given him a respectful obituary, a Grammys photograph, and a man at Sony saying on the record that an era was over. Nobody printed a hard word about him.
"Mottola's dead. Mike took care of that in January, the day of the inauguration. I haven't asked him about it and I'm not going to," Alex said. "But he didn't set it up alone." He breathed. "The other one is Howard Stringer."
"Stringer? Sony's Stringer? The man sent flowers to the hospital, APLUS. I signed for them. White lilies. I thought they looked like a funeral."
"They were supposed to. He's running Sony America now."
Howard Stringer was a Welshman who'd come up through CBS News and ended up president of the whole CBS network before he left in ninety-five. Sony had just brought him in to run Sony Corporation of America, which meant the studio, the record company and the electronics business in the States all answered to him.
"How sure are you? Because if you're wrong about this and it gets out, Sony's lawyers will eat us alive."
"I'm sure. I heard enough of it lying in that bed."
"Then we take it to the FBI on Monday. With Cochran, in Chicago, and we put the whole thing in front of somebody senior enough to—"
"No FBI. Listen to me first, then yell at me."
She shut her mouth and waited.
"You'll be signing most of the paper on this, so you need to know," he said. "Anthony Pellicano. You know the name?"
"The Hollywood detective? Somebody shot him in his own living room in January, three times, no witnesses, and the file went quiet inside a month. Nobody was ever charged. Two of our own attorneys used him before ninety-three, and one of them was dumb enough to put it on an invoice."
That was the public Pellicano, a squat man in a leather jacket who found people. The private one ran wiretaps. Studios hired him against stars, stars hired him against studios, lawyers hired him against both, and it all got billed as investigation.
"He wiretapped for a living. And he had me for four years. The houses, the studio, the phones. Mottola was paying for it."
"Four years. Four years of your phone calls." She put a hand on his arm, and it wasn't steady. "Including mine. God. So where are they?"
"Mike got the boxes out of his office the spring before last. All of them. They went into the A+ vault on Wacker because I couldn't think of anywhere better."
"You put stolen wiretaps in your own vault. Of course you did."
"Then last July," he said, "a man walked in with a federal badge and a subpoena nobody bothered to read past the first page, and walked out with fifty-one boxes. Chicago field office. Steve Haines. Remember that name, I'm going to want it again." He had to stop and breathe. "There's a group of FBI men, Chicago, New York, Washington, who look after each other. They take evidence out of one office and it turns up in somebody's lawyer's hands in another. Mayor Dinkins warned me about them years ago. He called them HR."
Sloane had heard of HR in Washington, never in a document, only as gossip: a few agents in three field offices who lost files for people who could pay, and covered for each other when anybody asked.
"Where did the boxes go?"
"New York. Sony had them by August."
The plane hummed.
Behind the curtain one of the nurses said something to the other. "It died again. My daughter's egg thing. The Tamagotchi. She made me take it for the shift and it died on the runway."
"So feed it," the other one said flatly. She'd been working nights since the Carter administration.
"I fed it! It wants to be played with. It's a key chain, and it wants to be played with."
"Press the middle button twice," the older one said. She was on the drug chart and had no intention of getting off it for a key chain.
"I've pressed everything. Look at it. There's a little ghost and a headstone."
"Then tell her it flew away."
"She's eleven, she's not stupid. Fifteen dollars, and I stood in line outside the store for it, and the woman in front of me bought four!"
Behind the curtain Sloane put her face down on the edge of the mattress and laughed until her shoulders shook, and Alex laughed with her, which hurt, and he told her so.
"Serves you right," she said into the sheet. "Tapes in the vault."
The younger nurse came through the curtain without asking, every twenty minutes like she'd been told, put two fingers on his wrist and watched the second hand of her own watch.
She'd been briefed at Teterboro by a man who gave no name. "No photographs. Not of the aircraft, not of the street outside your house, nothing."
"I wasn't going to—"
"No phone calls until you're home. And his name doesn't go on anything that leaves this airplane."
She'd put her hands behind her back. "Um — which name?"
"Either of them," the man had said, and left.
So the chart said one thing and the manifest said another, and she'd spent the whole climb-out working out what to call a man she'd watched on television at his own wedding.
"Mr.—" she started, and stopped.
He said it to the ceiling. "Alex. Just Alex. Nobody on this plane calls me APLUS, it makes me feel like I'm at work."
"Alex, then. Your pressure's low. You should eat something before you sleep."
His eyes were already shut. "I'm not hungry."
"That's a first," Sloane said. "Write that on the chart, nurse. Put a star next to it."
"Half a banana, then," the nurse said, trying not to laugh.
He lifted the right hand off the blanket, the one that only did what he asked if he asked it slowly, turned it over, and brought the fingers up one at a time, then together, then let go. He laid it back down. "That's my exercise. The doctor wants ten an hour and I'm behind."
The nurse looked at Sloane for help. "He'll eat it if you put it where he can see it," Sloane said. "He's like a dog that way." So she went back through the curtain and came back with the banana on a napkin, set it on the bed frame by his knee where he could reach it with the good hand or leave it, and pulled the curtain shut again.
"What's her name?" he said.
"Deborah. The other one's Grace."
He'd been working at names since he woke up — the dean's, the young doctor's, the two lawyers whose faces he hadn't managed to keep. Some of them slid right off. "Deborah's the one with the Tamagotchi."
"And you're the one with the banana. Eat it." Sloane peeled it down another inch for him and put it in his good hand.
He ate half of the half, slowly, with the good hand, put the rest back on the napkin, shut his eyes and opened them again.
At that same hour, in Thailand, Old Joe sat in a pink shirt at the desk in his house by the beach at Phuket, reading his bank statement.
Old Joe had put out the first song Alex ever wrote. He'd jumped bail at the end of ninety-four and gone where the FBI wasn't looking, and the million Alex paid him for the catalog had gone with him.
He read it twice. "Eleven and a quarter," he said, in that voice that came up out of the floor. "Pim! Come here and look at eleven and a quarter."
Pim came in from the kitchen and looked at it, drying her hands.
"On dollars they give me four and a half," Old Joe said. "On baht, eleven and a quarter on the call account, fourteen on the fixed deposits, and it's pegged, so it can't move. Twenty-five and a half to the dollar since before you were born."
"Then why isn't everybody doing it?"
"Because everybody's lazy!" Old Joe put the statement flat on the desk and whacked it twice with two fingers. "A man sits on four and a half percent and calls himself a businessman. Hmph."
"Your brother said—"
"Your brother thinks a bank is a building." He put the statement in the drawer with the others. "Tell the boy to bring the car round. And call little APLUS's people again. Somebody over there's got to answer a damn telephone eventually."
Over Pennsylvania Sloane turned to a clean page. "The vault on Wacker keeps a log. Who signed Haines in?"
"A night supervisor who doesn't work for us anymore. Don't chase him. He didn't sell anything. Somebody showed him a badge, that's all."
"So the supervisor's off the hook. Who's on it?"
"Nobody yet, and that's what bothers me." He shut his eyes. "Sony's got four years of my phone calls on tape and I'm not getting them back. So we leave the tapes where they are and go after the man who bought them. Stringer."
"You want to go to war with Sony from a stretcher." Sloane shook her head, then took his hand and held it on the blanket. "All right. I'm in. Obviously I'm in. Who else knows?"
He had it in order. "Mike, tonight. Hayden gets the name, nothing else. Vic gets the name and an order."
Vic Mackey was still pushing paper at the desk in a small-town station where the department had parked him, and hated every hour of it.
"What order? Vic doesn't take orders, he takes suggestions and then does what he wants."
"To stay away from it. Then Cassidy. Song Zecheng, once he's my lawyer. Nobody else."
She found the hole first. "What about Alicia?"
"Not Alicia. Her husband's the governor, and the governor's friends are cops."
"She'll be holding your files by Friday. The whole corporate set, the trust documents and the Musical America paper, in a room on the twenty-eighth floor with four associates reading them. You think she won't notice a hole shaped like Sony?"
"So she notices. Let her wonder about it on her own time, she's billing me for it anyway. She doesn't get told, Sloane, and I don't want to argue about it at thirty thousand feet."
"You're impossible." She let it go.
"Now, the baht," he said.
"Through Hong Kong. O'Grady books it with the currency desks there, Song Zecheng knows the people. Eleven million dollars of margin, no more. That carries about six hundred and fifty million dollars of baht forwards at twenty-five eight. Every baht it drops past twenty-six is about twenty-five million dollars to us. If it goes the wrong way we lose a house, not the company."
"Six hundred and fifty million. On a currency. From a man who's not allowed to hold a fork." But she was grinning. "And what does O'Grady take for booking it?"
"His usual. A quarter point on the notional and he's lucky to get that."
Every day the peg held, the interest came out of your own pocket, and the Bank of Thailand could keep that up for as long as its dollars lasted. Nobody in Bangkok knew how long that was. Alex did. The Crash had given him the day, the second of July, and the day was the one thing he couldn't say out loud, so he stuck to what everybody in the business knew: the Thai banks had borrowed dollars they couldn't pay back.
"Old Joe," Sloane said. "You said Thailand, and then you said his name."
"He's got everything in a Thai bank. The interest was good. I'll call him."
"And he'll tell you to mind your own business. You're his favorite and he'll still tell you to go to hell. And you want to ring up a man the FBI's been looking for since ninety-four? Use somebody else's phone."
"Probably. I'm calling him anyway. He sang my hook for nothing when I was fifteen and wearing somebody else's shoes."
"Softie." She bumped his knee with hers. "Anything else, or can I have five minutes?"
"Tell O'Grady not to sell the Netscape position. Not one share."
Alex owned two percent of Netscape, bought before the shooting. Even after this month's bounce, the stock was still down about thirty percent from what he'd paid.
"Why? It's up again this month. Everybody on the Street's taking profits on it."
Navigator was still how most of the world looked at the web. But Microsoft had woken up, and it was giving its own browser, Internet Explorer, away for nothing and putting it into Windows, and every quarter Navigator's share slipped a little more.
"Not one share, Sloane. I like the browser. I like Barksdale. Leave it."
The Revelation had given him the whole thing in the coma, all six hours of Valley of the Boom, finished and complete. Jim Barksdale's drawl, Marc Andreessen in his sneakers, the browser war with Microsoft, the whole mess. And at the end of it, AOL walking in and buying Netscape for four billion dollars in stock, two days before Thanksgiving, November 1998. He wasn't selling a share before then, and there was no way to explain that to anybody.
"Fine. And whatever pills you leave on the nightstand, I'm counting them. You try to take extra, I'll sit on you."
"Promise?"
"Oh, shut up." She went pink and pushed his shoulder, very gently. "Go to sleep."
"Wake me over Ohio."
She didn't wake him over Ohio. She sat with her feet on the bed frame and her fingers hooked through his and watched him sleep: a thin man in a hospital gown under a trench coat, with a plastic clip on one finger and half a banana on a napkin by his knee. Once, when Grace put her head through the curtain, Sloane waved her away without letting go.
The Lear came down through the cloud over the lake and the city stood up out of it grey and streaked. The seatbelt sign was for the nurses only. He'd been strapped to the bed the whole way.
Deborah braced the IV stand with one hand and her armrest with the other, and Grace read the numbers off the monitor out loud to nobody, for the write-up.
Old Mike came back through the curtain before the wheels touched, ducking, hat in both hands, and stood at the foot of the bed. "There's cameras on the tarmac, kid."
Alex didn't open his eyes. "How many?"
"Four vans. Somebody tipped them off. They've got the Barn case, the file number, all of it."
"Let them shoot the stretcher. Put the coat on me first, though. I'm not going on the six o'clock news in a gown with my ass hanging out."
Mike laid the trench coat over him himself, over the gown and the blanket, and squared the shoulders with the flats of his hands. He stepped back and looked at it, pleased with himself.
"The Tribune ran some doctor yesterday. Never laid a finger on you. Says a man doesn't come back from seven hours on the table and the months after. Two columns, with a diagram." He'd cut it out anyway. "You want me to call the paper?"
"Well, he's right about the guy in his diagram," Alex said. "Leave him alone. At least he signed his name to it."
The wheels came down hard. He shut his eyes against the jolt and opened them again.
"We're home," Grace said, trying to be nice.
"Home's got a pool and a cook. This is Midway." He got the right hand up to the knot of the coat at his chest and couldn't hold it there, and let it drop. Mike leaned in and tied it for him.
The door came open on the cold off the lake, and the first flashbulbs went off before the stretcher had cleared the cabin.
"Sloane, book the Hong Kong call."
"Tonight? You're being carried off a plane on a board."
"Hong Kong's awake. The baht's awake. Tonight." He found her hand without looking. "And come to the house after. Don't go to the hotel."
"Who said I was going to the hotel?" She squeezed, let go, and they carried him down the steps into the flashbulbs.